BENGALURU: There is personal sorrow, the sorrow that comes with the loss of someone you love, the loneliness, the separation, the anxiety for the other. With death there is also the feeling that the other has ceased to be, and there was so much that he wanted to do. All this is personal sorrow. Then there is that man, ill-clad, dirty, with his head down; he is ignorant, ignorant not merely of book knowledge, but deeply, really ignorant.
The feeling that one has for the man is not self-pity, nor is there an identification with that man; it is not that you are placed in a better position than he is and so you feel pity for him, but there is within one the sense of the timeless weight of sorrow in man. This sorrow has nothing personal about it. It exists.
Is there a relationship between sorrow and passion? I wonder what sorrow is. Is there such a thing as sorrow without cause? We know the sorrow which is cause and effect. My son dies; in that is involved my identification with my son, my wanting him to be something which I am not, my seeking continuity through him; and when he dies all that is denied and I find myself completely emptied of all hope. In that there is self-pity, fear; in that there is pain which is the cause of sorrow. This is the lot of everyone. This is what we mean by sorrow.
Then also there is the sorrow of time, the sorrow of ignorance, not the ignorance of knowledge but the ignorance of one’s own destructive conditioning; the sorrow of not knowing oneself; the sorrow of not knowing the beauty that lies at the depth of one’s being and the going beyond. Do we see that when we escape from sorrow through various forms of explanation, we are really frittering away an extraordinary happening?
Man has lived with sorrow from immemorial times. He has never known how to deal with it. So he has either worshipped it or run away from it. They are both the same movement. My mind does not do either, nor does it use sorrow as a means of awakening. Then what takes place?
What is the relationship of a mind which has understood sorrow and therefore the ending of sorrow? What is the quality of the mind that is no longer afraid of ending, which is death?
I have noticed personally within myself under different situations and climates, with different people who are aggressive, violent, the female takes over and becomes more prominent. This prominence, the other uses to assert himself. But when there is too much femininity around one, the male does not become aggressive but withdraws without any resistance.
The male is generally aggressive, violent, dominating and the female is the quiet, which is taken for submissiveness and then exploited by man. But submissiveness which is taken to be the quality of the female, is really gentleness which gradually conquers the other.